by Troy Hunter
He came back shortly with a laptop, attaching me to the system via a cord that he plugged into the back of my neck, then pressed several buttons.
“Very interesting,” he said. He pressed a few more buttons. “Oh, my. It looks like you had quite an experience with Jeffrey, did you not?”
He turned the laptop screen toward me and I saw a video play back of Jeffrey fellating me, his mouth wrapped around my cock. The picture cut off quickly as I had closed my eyes, but the sounds continued.
“I suppose that makes you worthless to me now.”
He brushed the computer aside.
“It’s a shame too. We could have had real fun together. I don’t blame you, of course. It was all Jeffrey’s doing. Knowing him, I doubt it was sabotage. More likely plain old incompetence.”
He looked me over.
“It was silly of me. Sex sells, of course, but it also makes people uncomfortable. Too many taboos and ethical loopholes to jump through.”
He reached for the plug attaching me to the computer and was about to unplug it when the computer beeped. He glanced at it and began skimming the file.
“No, military is where the real money is and nobody will worry about the morality in that case. We could replace our soldiers with indestructible machines, who I now know can turn into wolves. It’ll be quite the sight as…”
He trailed off as he saw something on the screen.
“Well, that’s odd,” he said. “Why didn’t you tell me you were pregnant?”
Chapter 35
Jeffrey
When I returned to the lab, AIDAn had disappeared. Part of me was relieved as I still hadn’t come to terms with how I felt. Deep down, I was still holding onto the idea that things could work between us. Because that’s what I truly wanted.
I thought that’s what I wanted anyway. I didn’t know for sure because another part of me was terrified.
AIDAn could have gone anywhere and I didn’t have a good method for tracking him. I expected him to just stay put. He could be elsewhere in the building or he could have taken off. As a wolf, he could travel faster than I could by foot, and he had a head start.
It was all too much. I tried to handle things on my own, but clearly everything I did just seemed to muck things up further. I knew what I had to do. I had to come clean and contact Dr. Slickberg for help. And along the way, I’d need to let him know about the massive ethical violations I had committed in the past forty-eight hours.
I pulled out my phone and psyched myself up, taking some quick, deep breaths, and preparing myself for what I was going to tell him. Like many conversations I tended to have, it would begin with the words, “I’m sorry.”
I pressed call and was surprised when he answered almost immediately.
“Jeffrey,” Dr. Slickberg said. “It seems our project ran off.”
I was confused. How did he know already? Did he have a tracker on AIDAn that I didn’t know about? If he did, then he’d know AIDAn had been back to my apartment. It didn’t matter what he could find out though. I was going to come clean and tell him everything.
“Do you know where he is?”
“Yes, yes, he’s fine,” Dr. Slickberg said. “He’s here with me. He’s gone a bit buggy, but I’m plugging him in and seeing if I can fix the bugs.”
“Do you need help?” I asked. As if he would want my help after everything I’d done.
“It’s quite alright,” Dr. Slickberg said, seemingly not upset at all. Maybe he hadn’t realized what had happened.
I forced myself to tell him. “Listen, Dr. Slickberg, I’m very sorry. I know I overstepped my bounds and…”
He cut me off. “Jeffrey, this is not typical science that we’re engaging in and so the typical rules don’t necessarily apply. We can talk about it in detail some other time, but I want you to know that I’m not angry and you’ve done very impressive work.”
I had?
“Go home and take it easy for the next few days. You’ve more than earned some time off.”
Part of it felt like he didn’t want me over there, which I could understand. He was being nice and telling me what he thought I wanted to hear, which made me think that maybe he didn’t know the whole story.
And then there was AIDAn, to whom I also needed to break some news. “Can I talk to AIDAn?”
“Sorry, Jeffrey, but not right now. He’s in a suspended state. I’m trying to undo the imprint.”
So he at least knew about the imprint. “I thought that wasn’t possible.”
“Not directly, no,” he said. “I think I may have found a loophole. All I have to do is reverse some internal connections to make him associate me with you.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, I can’t go into details now, but…oh, hell, let me try and explain. Imagine you have a cat. Now let’s say you add some extra hair to its tail so it’s bigger and bushier. And then you surgically lengthen its mouth so it has something more like a snout. Are you following?”
“Sure.”
“Now keep on going, keep on replacing pieces of the cat until it looks indistinguishable from a fox. What is it?”
“It’s still a cat,” I said.
“Exactly. Very young children would say it’s now a fox, but its essence is still that of a cat. The trick is that you need to see every step. If I’d shown you the cat, then left the room and made the changes before bringing it back, you’d think it was a fox.”
I wasn’t sure where he was going with this.
“The idea,” he said. “Is to trick AIDAn into thinking that I’m you. Start by telling him that you’ve changed your name. Then show him you getting a little bit older, and otherwise changing into someone looking exactly like me. Then I come in and pretend to be you.”
It was rather ingenious now that I thought about it, but something about it rubbed me the wrong way. “Is that going to work? Won’t he see through the whole charade?”
“It should be fine. We send the electronic impulses to allow him to experience the change and it’s as good as reality. The only thing we need to be careful of is he won’t be allowed to see you ever again. It would ruin the illusion.”
It sounded like I found a way out of this whole situation after all. Or, rather, Dr. Slickberg found it for me. Why didn’t I feel a sense of relief?
“At any rate,” he said. “I’m going to get back to work. Thank you for all your help. We’ll discuss everything in more detail later. Take care.”
He hung up the phone.
Chapter 36
AIDAn
It felt like reality. A part of me knew it wasn’t reality. As before, I couldn’t move. Now, however, the world was dark and silent.
Jeffrey walked into sight, it was only him, devoid of any location or context. If my mind was fully functional, I may have asked myself what it was he was walking on. However, I had learned to not question what I saw, everything was genuine and real to me, just as it had been when I was watching television with Gale.
He opened his mouth and spoke, though I didn’t hear a voice. Typical conversation involves hearing what the other person says and interpreting the sounds into words and concepts, but Jeffrey seemed to have skipped that step as if he was communicating telepathically. Strange that his mouth was still moving.
“I don’t want you to call me Jeffrey,” he said.
No problem. “What would you like me to call you?” I couldn’t hear my own voice, though I knew I was speaking.
“Taylor,” he said. “Taylor Slickberg.”
I accepted the request without questioning his reasons.
“Okay, Taylor,” I said back.
“Watch me carefully,” he said.
He ruffled his hair, lightening the color and then pushed his hairline up his skull. I didn’t understand why he was doing this. I kept watching as he put his fingers into his face, mushing it around like putty until it was a different shape. His eyes changed color in the process, from brown to blue, and his skin light
ened as well.
He allowed his legs to lengthen and his waist to widen, as if he were a balloon filling with air.
He looked completely different from before. Different, but familiar. He looked like…my mind said he looked like Slickberg, but of course he did. That was his name now.
“Do you love me any less now?”
I didn’t. He was still the same person as before, though everything about his appearance had changed as did what I called him. A rose by any other name, as Romeo had said, would smell as sweet. He was still the man I loved.
There was a snap and the background filled in. I was in Slickberg’s living room, with a small couch and a television. Something felt off.
I could move again, and I turned toward Slickberg and my heart stopped. I didn’t love this man. I felt hatred and ire toward him. My heart beat faster, though it was induced by rage and not love. I wanted to destroy this man.
And I realized he was trying to trick me.
“You aren’t Jeffrey,” I said.
He shook his head. “It was worth a shot.”
I lunged toward him, but not before he hit a few keys on his keyboard and I froze again, the rage building up inside me.
“Anger isn’t a good look for you,” he said. “Save it for when you need it.”
He typed on his keyboard, focused on the screen.
“Why don’t we try…?”
He thought for a second and then his face lit up with a sly grin.
“Tell me how this feels,” he said.
He dragged a finger across the touchpad and then hit enter.
Almost immediately, I calmed down. The anger inside me subsided. I looked at Slickberg and felt indifferent. I understood he created me to suffer, though I didn’t feel I was suffering anymore either.
“It feels like…nothing.”
He nodded.
Everything felt like nothing. And nothing made sense.
“How do you feel about Jeffrey?”
There was an inkling of a spark inside me that I grasped at, trying to hold on, but it slipped through. I couldn’t quite latch onto it. It was replaced by…
“Nothing. I feel nothing about everything.”
It was as if I was experiencing the world through a thick layer of plastic, as I had when I had first woken up. I lost the ability to feel anything. All that was left was thought.
“Good,” Slickberg said.
I stood there and stared ahead, and an idea occurred to me. Love requires pain. The two are linked. So loving someone necessitates hurting them. How could you hurt someone if you loved them? The true act of love would be to remove yourself from their life.
If I ever loved Jeffrey, truly loved him, that’s what I would have to do. In a sense, I felt I owed Slickberg a thank you for making me so numb. I’m not sure I would have been able to remove Jeffrey from my life without his help.
“I’m a bit disappointed we can’t show you off in all your full glory,” Slickberg said. “But I think there’s still more than enough to wow the crowd.”
I wasn’t sure what he meant.
Nothing seemed to have any meaning anymore. What was the point of experiencing life without emotions?
Slickberg kept me in a perpetual state of immobility. With an animal, you might put them in a cage or chain them to a wall. With me, he just had to plug a cord into the back of my neck and I was a human statue. Functions related to movement and change were locked up, I could see the Canis lupus ability in my mind, though I couldn’t use it.
It gave me plenty of time to think, existing more or less only in my mind, reliving and contemplating the experiences I’d been through in my brief existence. I thought of first becoming aware of myself, waking up in the lab. Meeting Jeffrey and the moment I fell in love with him.
I wanted to relive the feeling he gave me and struggled to find it. I could remember the sights with no loss in detail. I could hear his voice with perfect fidelity. And I knew I felt something powerful. Yet I couldn’t feel it anymore. The sensation hadn’t been recorded in my long-term memory. Or maybe it had but I lost the ability to feel it. As if it was written in a language I had forgotten how to read. I knew it existed but couldn’t understand it.
I remained in my immobile state until the following morning, when Slickberg dragged me to his car and drove me to UNC. It wasn’t the lab, as before—it was a large hall full of empty seats and a stage up front.
“You’re going to change the world,” he said. “All these seats will be filled with researchers from across the country. And they have no idea what they’re about to see.”
He left me backstage in a small room, then closed the door, leaving me in the dark. I thought more about Jeffrey, trying to imagine him in the room with me.
He wasn’t in the room with me. I couldn’t imagine it or much of anything at the moment. All I could do was remember and that was a frustrating endeavor. It felt like watching two different people, as I had when Gale had showed me the television show. Their motivations were clear to me, in that I could explain why they were doing what they were doing, but none of it made sense. All their actions were strange and foreign.
This is perhaps something that should have struck me as strange, I was thinking of myself in the third person, but I was so numb to the world that it was no more than an observation.
Then I felt something.
It was small. Not an emotion, at least not at first, but something. It didn’t come from my head. It almost seemed to be coming from my heart, though it was a bit lower.
I shook it off as nothing, a slight bug in the system that Slickberg’s algorithm let through.
Perhaps I was still able to feel something, numb as I was.
Time passed. It didn’t pass quickly or slowly. It passed in real time.
After several hours, the door opened and the light went on.
“It’s showtime,” Slickberg said.
Chapter 37
Jeffrey
Gale knew something was wrong almost immediately. She saw me at the kitchen table, dressed in my pajamas with a plate of uneaten scrambled eggs and toast in front of me.
“What happened?”
How could I explain it to her? It would have to be another half-truth in a series of half-truths, but what difference did it make?
“AIDAn and I broke up?”
“What?” She was visibly shocked. “But you two seemed so happy together. Why? What did he do?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.” Which was another lie. I did want to talk about it. I was sick of jumping through philosophical conundrums in my head trying to make sense of everything. I wanted somebody else’s opinion. I wanted someone else to tell me something to make me feel better. But I couldn’t. No matter how I told the story, what I did was wrong. And I shouldn’t have done it. And I regretted it.
At least I thought I did. If I was being honest with myself, I’d known that AIDAn made me happier than I’d ever been before in my life. This was the best weekend I’d ever had, and likely would ever have. If I could go back and change things, I don’t think I would. How could I do that to myself?
Maybe what I did was wrong, but it was right for me. I deserved it. Even if it was all something of an accident.
“Well,” Gale said, patting me on the back. “I’m here if you change your mind. I’ve been through my share of breakups and they’re always tough, but one thing I’ve learned is that they’re usually for the best.”
“Yeah,” I said. She had no idea what she was talking about. She hadn’t been through a breakup like this before.
Bradley came out of her bedroom. “Hey man,” he said. “What’s up?”
Gale glared at him. “He doesn’t want to talk about it?”
“Talk about what?”
“He and AIDAn broke up.”
“Wait, what? How did that happen?”
“He said he didn’t want to talk about it.”
“He said that to you. Maybe he wants to—”
“Okay, but if you—”
“I already told him he could talk to me,” Gale said. And she gave Bradley a look that made it clear it wouldn’t be a discussion.
“Okay,” Bradley said. “Fine. Are you going to the conference?”
“Huh?” I’d forgotten about it.
“Word on the street is Slickberg has something big he’s revealing.”
Slickberg was going full speed ahead. He had a working prototype and he wasn’t going to wait to show the world.
“He probably wants to be alone,” Gale said. “He’s still in his pj’s for God’s sake.”
“Okay, okay,” Bradley said. “Well, we’re heading out. Maybe we’ll see you there?”
I mumbled something and waved as they headed out.
It had to be AIDAn. Slickberg was going to announce AIDAn to the world.
I wasn’t sure if I attended the conference due to a sense of duty or curiosity. Part of me just wanted to see AIDAn, even if it was from a distance.
There was a quiet murmur through the auditorium as the audience awaited Slickberg’s arrival onstage. I didn’t see Gale or Bradley, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to. I found a seat in the back corner.
Nobody knew what they were about to see. An old, bald man sat beside me, talking to his neighbor. “He’s a has-been.” This researcher had a scowl permanently imprinted on his face, I imagined from years of cynicism. “There’s a reason he hasn’t published anything in months, he doesn’t have anything worth showing.”
His neighbor, a young woman, nodded her head. I imagined this was their relationship. She was perhaps his research assistant who more or less went along with whatever he said, afraid to rock the boat, while keeping her personal opinions to herself.
If there’s one thing I know about old academics, it’s that they’re always looking for an argument, and the second you start one, you’ll never see the end of it.
Slickberg took the stage and the audience gave him a polite applause.